Re: PATHEXT is fundamental to Windows and Should be recognised by CYGWIN

[Corinna Vinschen <corinna-cygwin at cygwin dot com>]

On Aug  8 09:43, cyg Simple wrote:
> On 8/8/2016 7:23 AM, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> > On Aug  7 10:11, Herbert Stocker wrote:
> >> On 05.08.2016 17:29, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> >>  If you see the
> >>> code required to handle .exe and .lnk extensions you don't *want*
> >>> PATHEXT support anymore.
> >>>
> >>
> >> Moreso, this code has recently broken my C++ code in Cygwin.
> >> It tried to see if a directory  /dir/subdir/something  existed,
> >> and Cygwin said yes because it found a /dir/subdir/something.exe .
> >> So my program failed.
> > 
> > I have some doubt here.  Cygwin always checks for "foo" first.
> > Only if it doesn't find "foo", it checks for "foo.exe", then
> > for "foo.lnk" and last, for backward compat, for "foo.exe.lnk".
> > 
> 
> Which is the exact cause of the issue.
> 
> > In the POSIX realm, "foo" == "foo.exe" == "foo.lnk".  The search itself
> > is indiscriminately, because Cygwin can't know if you're looking for
> > "foo" or "foo.exe" or a symlink "foo" using the .lnk suffix.
> 
> Why do you say "In the POSIX realm"?  Only Cygwin does this association.
>  I understand why it does so but is there a different way to achieve the
> same thing with greater accuracy?

No, sorry, but no.  Every time you start to double guess what the
application is looking for in a certain scenario, you lose.  See
the example I just made up in 

https://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2016-08/msg00124.html

And it's just *one* very simple example.


Corinna

-- 
Corinna Vinschen                  Please, send mails regarding Cygwin to
Cygwin Maintainer                 cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Red Hat

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